Sheldon Vanauken
Encyclopedia
Sheldon Vanauken is an American
author
, best known for his autobiographical book A Severe Mercy
(1977), which recounts his and his wife's friendship with C. S. Lewis
, their conversion to Christianity
and dealing with tragedy. He published a sequel, Under the Mercy in 1985.
and Columbiana County, Ohio
. Vanauken was named for his two grandfathers, Frank Vanauken, a teacher, and Sheldon Fitch Hanselman, an attorney. His father was a self-made lawyer who became influential in local politics, served as a state senator, and owned the Indiana Broadcasting Company.
Vanauken grew up at the family home, "Glenmerle", located on Carmel's south side (it has since been demolished to extend the Woodland Golf Course). He attended Culver Military Academy, Staunton Military Academy
and, for one year, Miami Military Academy in Florida. He earned his undergraduate degree from Wabash College
in 1938, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta
fraternity, and later attended Yale
and Oxford
Universities. He was interested in flying, and had his own small plane at Wabash which his father bought for him.
While at college, he dropped the "Frank" from his name. In later life, he was known to friends simply as "Van".
, Van met Jean "Davy" Palmer Davis. She was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on July 24, 1914, the younger of two daughters of the Rev. Staley Franklin Davis (1877–1926), a prominent Methodist minister, and his wife Helen Larter (Fredericks) Davis (1885–1950), a teacher. Her sister, Helen Marjorie (1908–1991), was six years older, and her brother Donald three years younger. Staley Davis was a native of Pataskala, Ohio, and Helen Davis of Newark, NJ.
When Davy was fourteen years old, two years after her father's death, she became pregnant by an unknown man. She gave the baby girl, whom she called Marion, up for adoption but never forgot her.
Davy had been educated in a Vermont boarding school, but had to withdraw due to lack of funds after her father's death. After finishing school, she worked in New York City for a time before moving to Indianapolis to enter Butler University
. Shortly after beginning her studies there, she met Sheldon Vanauken at the Indianapolis department store where she worked hand-tinting photographs to earn her tuition.
Van and Davy soon fell deeply in love and made a vow they called the "Shining Barrier". In brief, they promised to share everything in life, including all their interests, friends, and work, in order to tie themselves so closely together that nothing could ever separate them. Their devotion to this idea was so complete that they decided never to have children, as they felt that motherhood would be an experience which could not be shared equally. Both were agnostics at this time.
They were married secretly (due, according to A Severe Mercy, to Van's father's objection to early marriages) on October 1, 1937, ten months after they met. The young couple managed to keep their vow of complete togetherness for a number of years. Vanauken inherited a substantial amount of money when his father died suddenly during World War II, and used some of it to have a boat built which they named Grey Goose, for the bird which remains true to one mate throughout life. Following Van's studies in history at Yale, from which he received a master's degree in 1948, and a stint in the Navy stationed in Hawaii, the young couple spent considerable time sailing Grey Goose around Chesapeake Bay
, the Florida Keys
, and the Caribbean.
In 1948, Vanauken took a teaching position at Lynchburg College
. However, when postwar travel to Europe became possible again, he took a sabbatical and he and Davy moved to England so that he could study at Oxford University (he eventually was awarded a BLitt from Oxford in 1957). While they were there, they became friends with a circle of young Christian students. Eventually, Davy "crossed the room" to became a devout Anglican Christian herself; she had reexamined her life and views on the nature of sin after a thwarted attempt by a stranger to assault her. Her conversion was also partly owing to the friendship and influence of C. S. Lewis
, who was teaching at Oxford at the time. In the spirit of the "Shining Barrier", Van followed her, but with less conviction and even with some resentment.
Upon their return to Lynchburg, Van continued teaching history and literature at Lynchburg College. They joined a local congregation and explored their faith further. It was eventually to be tested severely. Davy contracted a virus which attacked her liver, possibly picked up during their years of travel. At the time of her diagnosis in the summer of 1954, Vanauken had just resigned to accept a job offer from his alma mater, Wabash College, but asked Lynchburg to rehire him in order to stay near Davy's doctors, which they did. Tragically, Davy died of her illness soon after, on January 28, 1955. She was 40 years old, and they had been married for over seventeen years.
A great part of A Severe Mercy concerns how Van came to grips with losing his beloved wife with the help of his increasing faith and his correspondence with Lewis, who soon was to face the loss of his own terminally ill wife. Vanauken later called the "Shining Barrier" he and Davy had created a "pagan love, invaded by Christ." He never remarried, and eventually converted to Roman Catholicism in 1981.
Van continued to teach at Lynchburg College to the end of his career. In the 1960s, he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War
and a supporter of the feminist movement
, although he eventually abandoned the latter in the belief that it had become too radical. He is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary of being one of the coiners of the word "sexist," in a pamphlet he wrote called "Freedom for Movement Girls Now" that was published by the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a southwide progressive student organization that he was active in the 1960s. He was also a candidate for public office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in Virginia. He expressed sympathy for the Confederacy
in his 1985 book, The Glittering Illusion, although he was always critical of racism and slavery.
After his conversion to Catholicism, he was a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review
and a frequent contributor to Crisis and Southern Partisan
magazines, as well as to other periodicals and newspapers.
He remained an ardent Anglophile all his life, and often used British spelling and expressions in his writing.
Sheldon Vanauken died of cancer
on October 28, 1996. His ashes were scattered in the churchyard of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Forest, Virginia
, as those of his wife Davy had been forty years previously. Some were also scattered in a churchyard in Binsey
, England, where a friend, Edmund Dews, had scattered some of Davy's ashes after her death. (Lewis' letter agreeing to scatter the ashes was lost in the mail, so Vanauken asked Edmund to do it.)
A movie version of A Severe Mercy was in development by Origin Entertainment in 2008. As of 2010, progress on making the film has apparently been suspended.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, best known for his autobiographical book A Severe Mercy
A Severe Mercy
A Severe Mercy is an autobiographical book by Sheldon Vanauken, relating the author's relationship with his wife, their friendship with C. S. Lewis, conversion to Christianity and subsequent tragedy. It was first published in 1977. The book is strongly influenced, at least stylistically, by the...
(1977), which recounts his and his wife's friendship with C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
, their conversion to Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
and dealing with tragedy. He published a sequel, Under the Mercy in 1985.
Early life
Vanauken was born Sheldon Frank Van Auken in Auburn, Indiana, the elder of two sons of a wealthy attorney, Glenn Vanauken, and his wife Grace (Hanselman) Vanauken. His parents were of German and Dutch descent, their grandparents having migrated to Indiana from eastern PennsylvaniaPennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
and Columbiana County, Ohio
Columbiana County, Ohio
Columbiana County is a county located in the U.S. state of Ohio. As of 2010, the population was 107,841. It is named for Christopher Columbus and the county seat is Lisbon....
. Vanauken was named for his two grandfathers, Frank Vanauken, a teacher, and Sheldon Fitch Hanselman, an attorney. His father was a self-made lawyer who became influential in local politics, served as a state senator, and owned the Indiana Broadcasting Company.
Vanauken grew up at the family home, "Glenmerle", located on Carmel's south side (it has since been demolished to extend the Woodland Golf Course). He attended Culver Military Academy, Staunton Military Academy
Staunton Military Academy
Staunton Military Academy was an all-male military academy located in Staunton, Virginia for much of its 116-year history. The school closed in 1976. Many notable American political and military leaders are graduates...
and, for one year, Miami Military Academy in Florida. He earned his undergraduate degree from Wabash College
Wabash College
Wabash College is a small, private, liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Along with Hampden-Sydney College and Morehouse College, Wabash is one of only three remaining traditional all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States.-History:Wabash College was founded...
in 1938, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta
Phi Gamma Delta
The international fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta is a collegiate social fraternity with 120 chapters and 18 colonies across the United States and Canada. It was founded at Jefferson College, Pennsylvania, in 1848, and its headquarters are located in Lexington, Kentucky, USA...
fraternity, and later attended Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
and Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
Universities. He was interested in flying, and had his own small plane at Wabash which his father bought for him.
While at college, he dropped the "Frank" from his name. In later life, he was known to friends simply as "Van".
Marriage and religious conversion
In his junior year at Wabash CollegeWabash College
Wabash College is a small, private, liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Along with Hampden-Sydney College and Morehouse College, Wabash is one of only three remaining traditional all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States.-History:Wabash College was founded...
, Van met Jean "Davy" Palmer Davis. She was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on July 24, 1914, the younger of two daughters of the Rev. Staley Franklin Davis (1877–1926), a prominent Methodist minister, and his wife Helen Larter (Fredericks) Davis (1885–1950), a teacher. Her sister, Helen Marjorie (1908–1991), was six years older, and her brother Donald three years younger. Staley Davis was a native of Pataskala, Ohio, and Helen Davis of Newark, NJ.
When Davy was fourteen years old, two years after her father's death, she became pregnant by an unknown man. She gave the baby girl, whom she called Marion, up for adoption but never forgot her.
Davy had been educated in a Vermont boarding school, but had to withdraw due to lack of funds after her father's death. After finishing school, she worked in New York City for a time before moving to Indianapolis to enter Butler University
Butler University
Butler University is a private university located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Founded in 1855 and named after founder Ovid Butler, the university offers 60 degree programs to 4,400 students through six colleges: business, communication, education, liberal Arts and sciences, pharmacy and health...
. Shortly after beginning her studies there, she met Sheldon Vanauken at the Indianapolis department store where she worked hand-tinting photographs to earn her tuition.
Van and Davy soon fell deeply in love and made a vow they called the "Shining Barrier". In brief, they promised to share everything in life, including all their interests, friends, and work, in order to tie themselves so closely together that nothing could ever separate them. Their devotion to this idea was so complete that they decided never to have children, as they felt that motherhood would be an experience which could not be shared equally. Both were agnostics at this time.
They were married secretly (due, according to A Severe Mercy, to Van's father's objection to early marriages) on October 1, 1937, ten months after they met. The young couple managed to keep their vow of complete togetherness for a number of years. Vanauken inherited a substantial amount of money when his father died suddenly during World War II, and used some of it to have a boat built which they named Grey Goose, for the bird which remains true to one mate throughout life. Following Van's studies in history at Yale, from which he received a master's degree in 1948, and a stint in the Navy stationed in Hawaii, the young couple spent considerable time sailing Grey Goose around Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. It lies off the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay's drainage basin covers in the District of Columbia and parts of six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West...
, the Florida Keys
Florida Keys
The Florida Keys are a coral archipelago in southeast United States. They begin at the southeastern tip of the Florida peninsula, about south of Miami, and extend in a gentle arc south-southwest and then westward to Key West, the westernmost of the inhabited islands, and on to the uninhabited Dry...
, and the Caribbean.
In 1948, Vanauken took a teaching position at Lynchburg College
Lynchburg College
Lynchburg College is a private college in Lynchburg, Virginia, USA, related by covenant to the Christian Church with approximately 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students. The Princeton Review lists it as one of the 368 best colleges in the nation...
. However, when postwar travel to Europe became possible again, he took a sabbatical and he and Davy moved to England so that he could study at Oxford University (he eventually was awarded a BLitt from Oxford in 1957). While they were there, they became friends with a circle of young Christian students. Eventually, Davy "crossed the room" to became a devout Anglican Christian herself; she had reexamined her life and views on the nature of sin after a thwarted attempt by a stranger to assault her. Her conversion was also partly owing to the friendship and influence of C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
, who was teaching at Oxford at the time. In the spirit of the "Shining Barrier", Van followed her, but with less conviction and even with some resentment.
Upon their return to Lynchburg, Van continued teaching history and literature at Lynchburg College. They joined a local congregation and explored their faith further. It was eventually to be tested severely. Davy contracted a virus which attacked her liver, possibly picked up during their years of travel. At the time of her diagnosis in the summer of 1954, Vanauken had just resigned to accept a job offer from his alma mater, Wabash College, but asked Lynchburg to rehire him in order to stay near Davy's doctors, which they did. Tragically, Davy died of her illness soon after, on January 28, 1955. She was 40 years old, and they had been married for over seventeen years.
A great part of A Severe Mercy concerns how Van came to grips with losing his beloved wife with the help of his increasing faith and his correspondence with Lewis, who soon was to face the loss of his own terminally ill wife. Vanauken later called the "Shining Barrier" he and Davy had created a "pagan love, invaded by Christ." He never remarried, and eventually converted to Roman Catholicism in 1981.
Later life
Many years after Davy's death. Vanauken went looking for the daughter Davy had given up for adoption as a young girl. The story of his search, their 1988 meeting, and how it affected his beliefs is related in The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies, which was written shortly before his death. "Marion", who had been given another name by her adoptive parents, had become a nurse and had three children with her husband, a physician.Van continued to teach at Lynchburg College to the end of his career. In the 1960s, he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
and a supporter of the feminist movement
Feminist movement
The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment and sexual violence...
, although he eventually abandoned the latter in the belief that it had become too radical. He is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary of being one of the coiners of the word "sexist," in a pamphlet he wrote called "Freedom for Movement Girls Now" that was published by the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a southwide progressive student organization that he was active in the 1960s. He was also a candidate for public office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in Virginia. He expressed sympathy for the Confederacy
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
in his 1985 book, The Glittering Illusion, although he was always critical of racism and slavery.
After his conversion to Catholicism, he was a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review
New Oxford Review
The New Oxford Review is a magazine of Roman Catholic cultural and theological commentary, founded in 1977 as an Anglo-Catholic magazine in the Anglican tradition. In 1983, the magazine officially "converted" to Roman Catholicism. The magazine championed Pope John Paul II's condemnation of...
and a frequent contributor to Crisis and Southern Partisan
Southern Partisan
Southern Partisan is a right-wing political magazine published in the United States founded in 1979 that focuses on its Southern region and those states that were formerly members of the Confederate States of America. Its first editor was Thomas Fleming...
magazines, as well as to other periodicals and newspapers.
He remained an ardent Anglophile all his life, and often used British spelling and expressions in his writing.
Sheldon Vanauken died of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
on October 28, 1996. His ashes were scattered in the churchyard of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Forest, Virginia
Forest, Virginia
Forest is a census-designated place in Bedford County, Virginia, United States. The population was 8,006 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Lynchburg Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Forest is located at ....
, as those of his wife Davy had been forty years previously. Some were also scattered in a churchyard in Binsey
Binsey
Binsey is a hill on the northern edge of the Lake District in Cumbria, England. It is detached from the rest of the Lakeland hills, and thus provides a good spot to look out at the Northern and North Western Fells of the Lake District, as well as the coastal plain and, across the Solway Firth,...
, England, where a friend, Edmund Dews, had scattered some of Davy's ashes after her death. (Lewis' letter agreeing to scatter the ashes was lost in the mail, so Vanauken asked Edmund to do it.)
A movie version of A Severe Mercy was in development by Origin Entertainment in 2008. As of 2010, progress on making the film has apparently been suspended.
Works
- Encounter With Light (booklet, 1960)
- A Severe MercyA Severe MercyA Severe Mercy is an autobiographical book by Sheldon Vanauken, relating the author's relationship with his wife, their friendship with C. S. Lewis, conversion to Christianity and subsequent tragedy. It was first published in 1977. The book is strongly influenced, at least stylistically, by the...
(1977) - Gateway to Heaven (novel, 1980)
- Under the Mercy (1985)
- The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy (1985)
- Mercies: Collected Poems (1988)
- The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies (1996)